Though I think you need 4. A human-ish one first, a four-legged bestial one, and a flying one, before the final one. Then the priest and crew arrive, and the end happens.
Oh, I was including what happens after the priest (whose name is Lord Emon, now that I have actually gone to check because I certainly didn't remember) as one of the colossus battles. Just trying not to openly spoil a nearly 20-year-old game for some reason I guess. My concern is that the value of the colossus battles in the game comes largely in the form of puzzle-solving, something that won't translate to film very easily. In the game, the fights don't advance the narrative much. The deteriorating state of Wander and some of the environmental cues do, but neither of those require the actual fight to be shown in full. We need one fight to set up the nature and danger of Wander's task, at least one more to make tangible that he has to do a bunch of these and they're all differently dangerous, and the confrontation with Emon because that's the conclusion to the story.
David Lowery (The Green Knight)
That's a brilliant suggestion, that film was exactly what would be needed to adapt this game. I don't have... well, much of any hope for the guy who is actually attached to it, but I suppose it's unfair to judge him too hard before we have any idea of if or how it will actually happen
I think you could do a fair bit by following the priest and his soldiers that are chasing Wander more than the game did. He can provide exposition to the soldiers as they travel, seeing more and more pillars of light in the distance as they do so. Have some banter along the way to get us to like one or two or the soldiers as well. Play up this party's protagonist energy.
In the meantime, let Wander talk to Dormin more. Dormin remains honest and helpful throughout the game, so I think you could easily add in concern for Wander and curioisity about why he's doing what he is doing. "What a strange, fascinating little mortal. We do hope he knows what he's doing."
I suppose you could probably only show maybe three colossus fights max, including the ending. Picking which ones get done in full would be tough. First one almost certainly has to be on the list. I think the giant flying serpent in the desert is probably the best one visually, so that'd be my other pick
Played the original Gran Turismo on a modern TV with my family last Christmas and it was honestly really distracting seeing geometry jump an actual appreciable distance on the bigger screen.
It's great fun! So long as you're on board with the experience it is trying to create, of course. FromSoft are good at what they do and don't much care for whether or not what they do is everyone's cup of tea
I'd love to try Bloodborne, because that gameplay combined with a bit of cosmic horror sounds amazing to me. I'll have to either wait for a PC port or learn about emulation, though
The thing that stuck out to me more than I expected about it is how painterly it often feels. It's exceptionally good at framing its environments in a spectacular or pleasing way even while the player has full control of the camera. I'm not usually one to worry about visuals too much, but this game's environments really stuck out to me. And while it is very high-fidelity and nicely rendered, it's less about the actual graphical performance than it is about the design of the environments
Elden Ring. Only the base game, and this is my first run. I have been very thorough with it, though. I'm currently trying to beat Malenia, then it's off to do the last boss
Victoria 2. Weekly multiplayer session with a couple of friends. It's 1915, and my people have just elected an anti-military party that is really hampering my efforts to swing a big imperialist stick around
Lorn's Lure. PS2 graphics, generous 3D platforming mechanics, and an impossibly vast and desolate megastructure to explore. Well I'm playing the demo of it, anyway. I am going to get the full version, it made a good impression.
I tried it out because I love the setting and we've obviously been somewhat starved for anything else Elder Scrolls, but I just couldn't get into it. It felt like it never rewarded me for exploring like the main series does. There's never something cool to find that's just hidden out of the way.
I did also feel a bit miffed that the Northern Elsweyr story (the new one when I played, and the reason I wanted to play) was just the Skyrim civil war again, but without even the interesting idea of the rebel faction being nationalists against an empire. It was very little to do with anything about Elsweyr, and then dragons became the focal point again anyway
Obviously each to their own. I do see the appeal of it. It's just not for me
One of the Paradox strategy games by a comfortable margin. It'll be one of the Crusader Kings or Victoria games. I've got a weekly game night with a couple of friends that was originally just CK, but has for a while now been working extremely slowly through a megacampaign. You can take the end of Crusader Kings and make it into a mod for the start of Europa Universalis, then repeat the process into Victoria and then Hearts of Iron. You need to set some rules for yourselves, because an experienced player doesn't need even a third of the CK timeline to demolish all AI threats, but the games are already good roleplaying fodder anyway so you can set rules that play into that. We're currently about three quarters of the way through Victoria
Outside of those, Noita or Deep Rock Galactic. For a while, those plus a podcast were my go-to "zone out brain off" relaxation, so the hours racked up
I feel like FromSoft's games have a nice solution to this in that generally speaking, the world has basically already ended and you're fighting through the wreckage to try to pick it up again. Not a viable option for every story, though, of course
I would quite like to see a game in which the events play out both without a completely fixed schedule and without being within the player's control. If we take Skyrim as an example, since everyone already knows how that one works, imagine if:
Civil war battles happen whether you are there or not. You get some notice about them or can maybe even ride in at the last moment to turn the tide, but they're happening with or without you.
Your sidequests to win over jarls and find powerful artifacts stack the odds in your chosen side's favour. Intercepting the messenger on that one mission allows you to avert an otherwise guaranteed loss for your side.
Alduin is also doing stuff on his own schedule. If you leave him unchecked, one of your allied jarls might have their army decimated trying to hold off a dragon attack without you.
If you leave Alduin unchallenged long enough, jarls start defecting to the Dragon Cult and directing dragons with armies as backup towards your side, knowing that you are fighting for them and are the biggest threat on the board.
Leaving your civil war side unsupported means that Balgruuf won't agree to help trap Odahving. You then have to track down info about the portal to Sovngarde in an ancient scroll and take the long and arduous journey up the mountainside yourself on foot, leaving your civil war side without you for days on end
You'd need to make sure that the player has control over when these events start, but it already does gate dragons behind that first quest to defend Whiterun. You want to just mess about in caves for the first twenty hours, sure, go ahead.
Obviously Skyrim was never going to do this because it isn't trying to be that kind of game. It wanted to be a do anything go anywhere power fantasy, and that's fine. But I would like more games to do this sort of thing. I think some of Paradox's strategy games actually do quite a good job of creating this feeling, but the gameplay is completely different (and it only works until you get good enough to just break the mechanics in half for most of them)
If you want pausable combat and a logistics focus, the Hearts of Iron games might be interesting to you. They're pseudo-real-time in that things happen on an counter that ticks forward once per in-game hour of the day (so the results of two units fighting, a diplomatic message being sent, construction on a building), but you can speed up, slow down, or pause however you wish. If you want to zip along at a few seconds of real time per day in game, cool. Want to slow things down to a few seconds per in game hour instead? Also fine. Need to pause while you read a description? Also fine.